Coupling between In Vivo Endomicroscopic Imaging and Visualization Computing

Confocal laser endomicroscope (CLE) is emerging as an in vivo and in situ imaging tool for early diagnosis of mucosal cancers. While an optical slice of the lesion obtained by CLE provides partial information of the microstructures, a concurrent 3D reconstruction would be much more helpful in extracting meaningful inferences. The locality of different structures and their depth relations can be made easy to analyze and comprehend. Unfortunately, currently available CLE systems lack the function of real-time image registration and 3D reconstruction, which motivates us to develop a novel solution to meet the need in the diagnosis and prognosis of oral mucosal lesions. Technical challenge for concurrent 3D visualization of the acquired stack of confocal images is the real-time image registration and reconstruction algorithms. We propose to exploit the graphics hardware to speed up these algorithms. Especially, we present our novel algorithms for the nonrigid image registration and interpolation in cellular imaging, volumetric feature detection and enhancement in rendering, as well as ubiquitous volume rendering on various clinic terminals including nowadays tablets and smart phones. Experiments on animal models and clinical trials on human volunteers are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed technologies.